Is there a more stressful job than instructor for an extreme sport with such a high risk of death or serious injury? (I literally cannot imagine, though I hope I at least overstate the risk in my mental model.)
Jumping out of a plane wearing a wingsuit is reasonably safe. If something goes wrong, you deploy your parachute. If your parachute fails, you deploy your reserve. You have plenty of time to control with a spin or stall.
Jumping off a rooftop or a mountain wearing a wingsuit is practically suicidal. If something goes wrong, you die. The margin of error is simply too small.
The latter form of wingsuit flying is relatively new and highly controversial, even within the wingsuit and BASE jumping communities.
Off of a rooftop would be practically suicidal. Wingsuits need time to inflate and start flying, which for the best guys on the planet is around 300 feet. Normal humans require about 400. 'Margin' is a word that has a bunch of different contexts, most of which still put wingsuit base in a reasonably safe range. Terrain flying, which is the sub-discipline of wingsuit base where you're goalposting trees, is indisputably the most dangerous sport on the planet, and I've lost six friends to it in the last year.
I don't know that i'd describe it as 'controversial' but would rather describe it as 'that thing a bunch of people with nowhere near enough experience or currency to be doing it keep doing and fucking killing themselves.'
So as some people further in the thread have brought up, you start flying wingsuits out of airplanes, and you start in suits that are far more forgiving than the ones you'll end up flying. It's similar to how a pilot first learns how to land a Cessna before you try to land an F-18 on a carrier at night in a storm.
We do often (as instructors) talk about how nervous we get when we're with a student that we're pretty sure is just going to flatspin uncontrollably for like 8k ft and it's just like 'Okay heres everything you need to really have a bad afternoon. Dont? Please?'
Presumably all the good days make up for the very bad ones, else you wouldn't do it. Those must be really really good days (I find it impossible to imagine this as well.)
Oddly enough (and probably speaking to our mindsets as a community), it was the death of a good buddy of mine that pushed me to finally start base jumping.
